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Mary Hilson. Political Change and the Rise of Labour in Comparative Perspective: Britain and Sweden, 1890-1920.

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Mary Hilson. Political Change and the Rise of Labour in Comparative Perspective: Britain and Sweden, 1890-1920. Lund: Nordic Academic P, 2006. Pp. 352.

Good comparative labor history is less common than it should be. When done well, it forces us to qualify our assumptions about the development of national labor movements. Mary Hilson's comparison of the development of the labor movement in the communities around the British and Swedish naval shipyards in Plymouth and Karlskrona, respectively, is just this kind of study. It is a contribution to the literature on the labor movement in two primary ways.

First, it offers an excellent review of the various theories of the rise and development of national labor movements, especially those of Britain and Sweden. Such theories are, as Hilson notes, at a relatively high level of generalization and given to pointing to the "exceptionalism" of this or that national labor movement under consideration.

Second, the volume provides a micro-level analysis of labor's rise in the two dockyard communities. Both naval shipyards date to 1690, and there were few industrial enterprises comparable in size during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fact that these were state-owned and -run...

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